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Monday, October 7, 2013

Themes and Ideas in The Amazing Morse

I’ve wanted to have someone write a paper on my book,
The Amazing Morse, but as that is not forthcoming, allow me to point out some
of the themes and concepts which are in the novel.

The book begins with a man sitting in an office
cubicle, reading a book of detention hardware as part of his work. He imagines
the various pieces of hardware coming together and forming a prison cell around
him, even as the cubicle walls form a sort of prison of their own, a prison of
conformity to which he subjects himself.

There is a definite Hindu perspective to this. Man is
cut off from the greater reality, each person separated from the greater
universe. I jokingly refer to Sting’s The Soul Cages in my second book, and I
think that is a fair comparison. But I think the idea of walls and square
dividers work on many different levels. The intellect chops things up in to
little pieces in order to be able to digest it. It places a grid over the real
in order to treat the whole as individual pieces of data. But whatever the
intellect experiences is an indirect experience. Our deepest truths are
experienced directly, in a way words can never adequately explain. But the
older we get, the more we become adults, the less most of us are able to
perceive the world in a direct manner. We perceive things in an intellectual
manner, see things for what they represent rather than what they are. We become
many levels of abstraction away from the essential truth of things.

Dave Morse’s childhood dream was to be a magician.
Because of his love of magic, and because of his desire to hold on to the
dreams of his childhood, he is still able to see life through the eyes of a
child. Therefore he does not fit in to the business world, a place where conformity
of thought seems to rule the day. But while he is a magician, he is not an
escape artist. A traumatic experience in his youth has left him with a fear of
confinement. Thus he is a failure to himself. Unlike his hero, Houdini, he is
unable to risk his life in daring escapes. He feels like a fraud, performing
tricks and illusions rather than being a true performer. So while Dave has
maintained the ideals of youth, he has failed to develop his adult capacity to
live those ideals.

Dave sees his personal plight working itself all
around him as well. While Dave sees work as a mass of square cubicles, he sees
the neighborhood he grew up in as an endless row of almost identical houses,
each only a minor variation from the other. Such an environment breeds
conformity. Even the field that he and the other neighborhood kids used to play
in has been built over and is now indistinguishable from all the other cubed
and sliced up patches of sameness that is the suburbs. There is no place left to
hide from the all-consuming conformity.

And yet there are some areas that seemed to resist the
wave of prefab houses that are everywhere in the suburbs, places where older
buildings already existed. In one such area, Dave encounters a psychic, who
with a single touch does something strange and unexplainable to him.

He begins to have bad dreams, which push his ability
to make sense of his life to the limit. He begins to realize what a tentative
grasp on reality humans have. He cannot find intellectual answers to his
problems. Again, the intellect is an ineffectual tool for understanding the
world.

While Dave’s world unravels around him, he is pushed
to make decisions which could ruin his life, or quite possibly, end the lives
of others. He tries to be brave, but cannot bring himself to confront his fear
of imprisonment. He settles on a compromise of his values, which almost leads
to his undoing. But the seeds he sewed in his childhood have not been
completely fruitless.

Dave learns that the world he lives in is far larger
than any he has allowed himself to believe. He realizes most people live in a
small world for fear of the larger, more dangerous one that exists. But in
hiding from the dangers of the larger world, they also cut themselves off from
the magic that exists. Most people live in a small world and so feel cut off
from the real world. They perceive the stars through a telescope, see a world
so vast that they feel like they are nothing. In living in a small world, they
can pretend they are bigger than they are, but they are cutting themselves off
from the truth, and the truth might just be beautiful. No matter how small a
part we play, we are not outside observers. We are all part of that great big
universe. If we live fully in the small space that is given us, we are playing
our part in that vast and cosmic play. In truly being ourselves, rather than
submitting ourselves to an artificial reality, we become one with everything.

Find My Writing Here

Shell Shock

The Amazing Morse

The Association

Perchance To Dream

Seven Stones

About Me

The Amazing MorseThe Amazing Morse is a blog dedicated to my works of fiction, primarily my first series, The Amazing Morse. My postings will be either from my own perspective or that of my character Dave Morse.